Thursday, February 07, 2008

What a crappy day for public transport. It took an hour to get from Oxford Circus to Paddington. First the Bakerloo line got suspended. Then back to the Central line where a signal failure at Marble Arch had me stuck in a tunnel. Finally to Notting Hill Gate and onto the District line. Stuck at Bayswater, a "defective train ahead". That will teach me to try and get through London quicker than on the Hammersmith and Shitty line which today seemed to be the only one that didn't fail.

On the way home we sat outside Paddington alongside Westbourn Grove as a "minor technical fault" brought our train to a standstill. Thank fuck for my iPod, I managed to watch 2 whole episodes of Life on Mars on my commute today.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

It's took quite a few hours even with the experience of jailbreaking 1.1.2 to get my ipod on 1.1.3 and jailbroken. It should have been really easy but I misunderstood what was happening with the soft upgrade that was in the installer.

I had hoped that the upgrade would leave my installed apps and settings intact, silly me. After reading through many blogs I was still left with too many options. NateTrue, ModMyIphone or the "official" Dev Team upgrade. In the end I went with the simplest, the "official" release as it was right there in the installer.

I set it off and went in the bath and when I came back it was just about to reboot (yeah, it takes that long). When it came back it only had the installer and a butt ugly new dock. No message about editing home screen, no wiggle, no new apps. By then it was bedtime so I decided to leave it another day.

Trying to figure out what had gone wrong I decided to restore the ipod back to factory settings and start again. This lead to a world of pain as the 1.1.3 firmware is locked so that it can't be downgraded using the usual option click upgrade method.

To get it downgraded I had to first put it into recovery mode then use the option click on restore to put the 1.1.1 firmware in. After that it was the usual easy process to jailbreak it and prep it for 1.1.2. Then I tried the 1.1.3 installer and got back to... exactly the same place. hmmm.

OK so obviously my expectations were out of line with reality, not for the first time in my life. More googling revealed that I needed to add the applications and icon wiggle in from another repo. No problems, just add a new repo source and... oh, it crashed. Reboot try again. Same crash. I seem to have corrupted the keyboard somehow so that every time its used the whole OS falls over. Not good.

So all the way back to the beginning I go just crossing my fingers that it was just a glitch. Time passes. Eventually I am back at the sparse home screen (my god that dock is ugly) and ready to add a source to the installer... Brilliant! This time it works and after some fiddling in other apps I am happy the keyboard is stable.

Prep the Ipod, Install the apps, reboot and... Wiggle! Well at least now I can put the icons where I want them, which is what I was using the now broken customize application for anyway. That dock is still ugly so I am looking forward to an update to customize that lets me put it back to the understated dock that I didn't even realise was so nice.

What I don't get is how Apple can justify charging £13 for the apps and the wiggle. The ipod costs basically the same as the iphone that has the apps included. I have a bad feeling about the yet to be announced details of the SDK as the wiggle seems to be in preparation for 3rd party apps and if thats not available on ipod officially without coughing up... Well lets wait and see eh?